Every day, the users of the Internet send each other billions of electronic messages (e-mails). An individual may send a dozen or more e-mails each day without even thinking about it. Obviously, e-mail, or electronic mail, has become an extremely popular communication tool. In the past, people have maintained contact lists on paper. The proverbial “black book” is a good example of a list of individuals and their contact information. Unfortunately, the task of maintaining current a large contact list is often too onerous for the few times one needs to contact each individual.
Electronic mail systems, for example, permit users on different computers to communicate with one another by transmitting information such as text messages and the like between the different computers. Electronic mail is often used to permit employees in a company to communicate with other employees connected to the company's internal network, regardless of whether they are in the same building or another company facility. Also, due to the explosive growth of the Internet, electronic mail has now become a relatively common way for anyone with a computer to communicate with other computer users all over the world.
Such tremendous success raises many security issues. Some people perform hacking—trying to violate someone else's computer security for fun, stealing industrial secrets, stealing military secrets, and so forth. Some people develop viruses, worms or other harmful applications for contaminating computer systems and thereby causing damage thereto. Internet and more specifically the electronic mail systems have become a convenient medium through which to receive “infections.”
In order to counteract the above-mentioned attacks, a typical commercial private computer network comprises a protection system such as a firewall. There are also personal firewall software packages available. “The perfect personal firewall would be inexpensive and easy to install and use, would offer clearly explained configuration options, would hide all ports to make your PC invisible to scans, would protect your system from all attacks, would track all potential and actual threats, would immediately alert you to serious attacks, and would ensure nothing unauthorized entered or left your PC” (Jeff Sengstack, in Make Your PC Hacker Proof, PC World; Jul. 21, 2000). Basically, a firewall is a security process in the form for example of a program or hardware device between an internal network and the Internet for filtering information coming through an Internet connection into a private network of computer systems or into a single computer system, and preventing certain types of transactions from occurring. If someone wants to retrieve a file, a document, or any information from a computer system or a network, a request is sent through the Internet to the computer system or network. The firewall, which is strategically positioned at the Internet connection intercepts the request and blocks or disables it. However, when information is sent from a computer system or the network through the Internet via a known channel such as electronic mail software, the firewall does not intervene. Further, data received from the Internet is allowed to enter the network unfettered so long as it is not deemed a security concern. When a virus protection software application and a firewall application are both up-to-date and in execution, a system should be safe from most security threats.
Therefore, in order to bypass firewall applications to be able to extract information from a computer system or a network, people have started to use those known channels for providing the extracted data. For example, an active email message is provided from the Internet to an electronic mail application in execution on a computer system. The electronic mail message includes a small application for transmitting information from the computer system or the network out to the Internet. Fortunately, existing firewalls disable these messages.
Another method of extracting information involves providing an active email message from the Internet to an electronic mail application in execution on a computer system. In this method the electronic mail message includes only a single instruction in the form of a retrieve file instruction with associated parameters. The parameters are substituted, in part, by the electronic mail program allowing some information about the system to be retrieved. With the common adoption of this probing format, existing firewalls now disable these messages as well.
A service offering automated updating of electronic contact information and ensuring current contact information is offered by GoodContacts® through their World Wide Web site. GoodContacts® addresses the difficult task of enabling people to stay connected to their many circles of contacts. The service provided by GoodContacts® allows for maintaining contacts, updating and management of personal information relating to contacts and provides a dynamic link to all personal and professional relationships. This is performed by providing a method for each user to transmit to other users requests for information updates, thereby allowing for automatic updating of the user contacts within their address book.
When no reply is provided, it is assumed the electronic mail message was delivered to its destination. This, however, may be incorrect. And it would be extremely advantageous to know that an electronic mail message has been delivered, even when not responded to. Unfortunately, any information provided from the recipient computer system back to the sender in an automated fashion is typically filtered by a firewall and, as such, most straightforward methods are inapplicable to typical corporate environments.
In order to overcome such drawbacks of the prior art, it would be advantageous to provide a system that allows this functionality—notification of receipt—without being noticed by a secure firewall application and without violating the security afforded by the firewall.